Links

We have reached the era of the Internet when we see the big commercial public projects failing to be what we need. Google has become a mess of ads and AI assisted SEO hacking: the search results are nowhere near as good as they were in the past. All the small human sites have disappeared from the results as they can’t compete with paid visibility.

Then we have the social media sites: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter… they’ve become doomscrolling experiences. Again, money and the desire to keep you on their site has ruined the good parts.

So the solution? Make your own site and have a page of links. Other people have also resurrected webrings to provide the random “you’ll never know where you end up next” experience that used to be so common on the web in the past.

Links by topic

Create websites: HTML, CSS, etc.

It is easier than ever to learn on web development. Cross-browser issues are mostly a thing of the past, there are lots of new powerful HTML and CSS tools available that greatly reduce the need for complex JavaScript solutions, and even JavaScript itself has evolved massively in the past years. We now also have great tools that allow using JavaScript throughout the entire stack, so you no longer need to learn multiple programming languages if you wish to set up a non-static site.

Firefox

I highly recommend Gecko as the main engine for web developers. Why? Chromium and WebKit both have more peculiar and odd issues when they bug out. So when you are learning for example CSS in an experimental way it is great to work on an engine that fails in predictable ways. And from my personal experience of 20 years I would say Gecko does a lot better job on this front than the other engines. So, go get yourself a Firefox!

Mozilla Developer Network

Just go read the MDN HTML and MDN CSS documentation!

My own way to learn the web was to try out all the things that were available using docs similar to what MDN is today. These days experimenting is easier as you have things like MDN playground where you can simply get started by doodling around.

Fonts

Most sites don’t need their own webfont to look great, you can use Modern Font Stacks to use immedialy available system fonts that look similar to each other!

Node.js

Should you wish to develop your whole stack with JavaScript it might be good to go with Node.js.

Alternatively if you want to live on the edge and have the ultimate speed, you may wish to check out Bun!

If you use Windows I recommend getting Windows Terminal.
You may also wish to consider setting up WSL (= Linux) if you are looking for best compatibility.

Astro

Buildings sites with Astro is awesome. It uses islands architecture so you can optimize client-side JavaScript to small separate pieces easily. Astro is currently the best available tool for great performance and it has a nice developer experience as well. It kind of provides the good feeling of what PHP site development felt like in the past, but without all the bad parts.

Also, Astro does not limit you to one front-end library! You can use vanilla JS, React, Preact, SolidJS, Vue, Svelte… pretty much whatever you want. This makes it a great SSR / SSG option to use for opening the possibility to move away from React. For example it often is easier to first refactor a NextJS site to Astro than it is to refactor all your components to be non-React. Of course, if you have gone and chosen the poison that is React Server Components, you will have a lot harder job ahead of you.

Urbanism: better cities for everyone

Many of us live in cities and towns these days. For the vast majority the creation of pleasant urban spaces and options to travel without a car is of upmost importance. We need to block through traffic of cars, provide more walkable spaces, have the services near people, increase amount of trams (light rail) and improve the rail network.

Then there is also the suburban experiment of the United States which has been a failure and cannot continue for a multitude of reasons: it is not financially feasible anymore, it hurts the environment badly, and isn’t all that great for people either if you think about it for more than a few seconds.

Not Just Bikes

Europe and specifically Amsterdam is just better. But why?

CityNerd

This guy is top 10 worthy with no fear of being only in the honorable mentions. You might find some degree of humor occasionally. Viewer suggested topics always welcome. Especially if you pay him a coffee.

City Beautiful

A broad take on transportation, land use planning and urban design, with a good bit of history.

The Life-Sized City

Mikael Conville-Andersen is the host of the first global documentary series on urbanism, and is an actual urban designer. His series have been running on television for years, but due to that access to the content depends on country and time. The video below is from his YouTube channel with limited production quality compared to the series, however there are bits and pieces from the documentary series as well.

Getting your hands on and watching the entire The Life-Sized City series is highly recommended!

Nebula

Nebula is a streaming service directly by the creators themselves. You can find more good urbanism and documentaries from there! It is on the cheap side, there are no advertisements, they do not track your behavior (no Algorithm), and you support the creators directly. What there is not to like?

You can find Not Just Bikes, CityNerd and City Beautiful in there and their videos are free from sponsor ad spots when viewed on Nebula.

Educational documentaries

I watch a lot of documentaries on various topics and this is where I share the insanity with you.

The Entire History of the Universe

A great series on how the universe got started.

Play the series playlist

The Entire History of the Earth

A great series on how this third rock from the Sun got started.

Play the series playlist

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Learn all sorts of science.

The Pacific War

This weekly series by Kings and Generals takes an indepth view on The Pacific War, highlighting on stuff that usually gets omitted when speaking about the Second World War.

Play the series playlist

Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games

Masahiro Sakurai is the man behind hugely popular Kirby and Super Smash Bros. game series. For a long time he wrote to a magazine, but he has now started producing a high quality series to YouTube, and pays all the expenses from his own pocket. No advertisements. No sponsors. Just quick videos that are to the point.